


On Rogue Telepath Allegations - A Response (Part 2)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [117]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Allegations Of Child Sexual Abuse, Backstory, Canon As Propaganda, Canon Compliant, Episode: s02e07 A Race Through Dark Places, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, How canon misled you, No Talia you're not woke, Psi Corps, Rogue Telepaths, Teen Pregnancy, Telepath culture, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-03 11:44:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14568309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: InA Race Through Dark Places, a rogue telepath alleges that as a young teen, she was abducted and force-impregnated by teachers at a Corps school.True or false?(TW for mention of child sexual abuse - since these allegations are made in canon, I have to discuss them in order to refute them.)The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	On Rogue Telepath Allegations - A Response (Part 2)

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

_Please note that background to this episode is discussed[here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12827937)._

_A discussion of the first rogue telepath allegation has already been covered[here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12852477) and [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12861987).  
_

\-----

In _A Race Through Dark Places_ , Talia has been kidnapped by rogue telepaths. One of them has the following dialogue with her:

Rogue telepath: My talent woke up when I hit puberty. The Corps took me in, said I was a P11, as high as you can go before they turn you into a Psi Cop. After two years, they picked another P11 and said I had to marry him. They wanted to increase the odds of breeding a P12 or higher. I refused. One night, I woke up, heard voices, something soft over my face. Felt hands lifting me out of bed. The next morning, they tried to tell me it was all just a dream. Four weeks later, I discovered I was pregnant.

Talia: Oh, my God.

Rogue telepath: When she was born, they took her from me. As soon as I could walk, I escaped from the hospital. I never saw my baby again. Maybe the Corps served a function a long time ago. Now it's something else. I know it. You know it. We can't let it go on this way.

True or False?

**Mostly False.**

First, for the one piece that is true: All children born in the Corps are raised by the Corps. In most cases, children enter the Corps between ages three and five (when they join their cadres), but when teenagers come into the Corps pregnant (it happens), or get pregnant while in school (despite sexual relations among students not being permitted, it happens), the babies are raised in the creche along with all other babies born to teenage mothers in the Corps, who are orphaned as infants (e.g. Bester), or whose parents are unable to care for them.

She also never saw her baby again because _she ran away_. Of course she would have been allowed to see her child had she stayed. Also, according to this story, she was thirteen or fourteen when she had the baby. She expected to raise the baby herself, while effectively in _middle school_?

Now, for the rest of this mess.

  * **The Corps does not arrange marriages for thirteen-year-olds.**



If she said the Corps asked her to marry someone when she was nineteen or twenty, this piece would be believable. The Corps _does_ sometimes [recommend marriage](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14550252) to  _adults_ , such as Al Bester and Talia Winters (but not Lyta Alexander, Byron Gordon, John Matheson, or many others). But this girl wasn't an adult (even if, as I recall, the actress who portrayed her on screen seems older) - she says the Corps tried marry her off _two years after she reached puberty_. Students in the Corps are not even permitted to have consensual sexual relations with classmates [at the age of eighteen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14551104) \- the Corps does not marry off thirteen-year-olds.

Furthermore, I don't even believe that Earth Alliance law would allow anyone to marry so young, telepath or not. The Corps doesn't marry or divorce anyone - all marriages, whether normals or telepaths, go through the Earth Alliance civil system/courts. The Corps can't force anyone to marry, and certainly not someone who is legally too young to marry in the first place.

("But wait!" someone's going to say. "What if someone thought the Shadows were coming Any Day Now and wanted to try to increase the telepath population before then?" ...You do realize that only 5% of telepaths develop their abilities before puberty, right? So we're still talking about another 12-20 years before this child develops telepathy, right? So, no. This also makes no sense. Nor would the Corps' response to "the Shadows are showing up any day now" be "quick, we have have sexually abuse children!" I can't believe I even have to say this.)

  * **The Corps doesn't force-impregnate anyone - not adults, and certainly not children.**



This is why I just wrote that [whole essay](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14555994) on artificial insemination in the Corps - what happens and what doesn't happen.

  * **If any of this did happen to her, and the teachers wanted her to believe it had just been "a dream," why did they let her remember it in the first place?**



If there really had been some Evil Plot among the school teachers and staff to abduct and force-impregnate this girl, and they didn't want her to know about it, they would have erased her memory of it. _That's not hard to do_.

So, what happened? How does a thirteen-year-old girl get pregnant in school, and come to believe this has happened to her?

Sadly, the simplest explanation is that she was raped by someone, either an older student or a staff member, and that person was strong enough telepathically to alter her memories and make her believe the teachers and staff had done this to her, so she wouldn't tell. Sometimes, sexual assaults do happen in boarding schools, either run by normals or by telepaths. **If someone's looking to cherry-pick horror stories, then across the whole EA, with ten million telepaths** \- most of whom are in the Corps - a story can be found where someone was raped in school.

And perpetrators will do anything not to be caught - in this case, possibly even alter the girl's memory. (Why he would have come up with this story, and not just erase her memory of the event, makes no sense to me, but this is my best guess as to what could have happened, given the little we know.)

The girl goes to the teachers, who genuinely don't know anything about it, and who tell her it was just a dream. They tell her that it didn't happen because _it didn't happen_.

When the teachers later discovered she was pregnant, though, they would investigate. A thirteen-year-old girl has become pregnant in their school, and there is evidence that her memories were altered? It sure looks like something criminal and horrible has happened. There's no explanation given why they didn't investigate (the episode's point is just to drop the most horrific allegation possible, while explaining nothing) - maybe the teachers did investigate and she doesn't know about it, maybe she doesn't believe they were really investigating, etc. (A paternity test on the child would resolve the question of who had abused her, but as she says, she'd run away by that point.) All we hear is a few lines from her point of view, filtered through the author's agenda to vilify the Corps and make the viewers believe they systematically sexually abuse children.

Could this one girl have been raped in school? Yes. Telepath criminals exist (not just rogues) - that's why Psi Cops exist. That doesn't make such abuse commonplace, however - it could still be quite rare - and it certainly doesn't make it _actual Corps policy_ to do this to children, which is the implication here, since this girl then goes on to say the entire Corps should be abolished based on what these particular school staff members allegedly did to her. She is not calling for an investigation into what occurred in that school - she has run away in Franklin's pipeline to [actual slavery](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12827937), and she's claiming that the entire Corps, though it once may have "served a function" "a long time ago," now needs to be abolished. And that naturally, Talia "knows this," too.

(And then because this is the _author's_ point, to justify the "moral position" of his good guys in this episode and in later episodes, Talia agrees with the rogue telepaths by the end (Ivanova was right! I've been a victim of the Corps, too, all along!), and thus establishes her status as the show's token "good" (and "woke") telepath character.)

It's as thin as plastic wrap and just as transparent.

The real tragedy is that of this poor girl, who is going from sexual and telepathic abuse by someone at school, to what she's facing in "the outer colonies" (more of the same, and maybe worse).

\-----

Post script: If she's a P11, the man who assaulted her is likely a P12, possibly himself a Psi Cop. We also don't know her memories were altered just once - he may have erased her memory after the rape, then rearranged her memories a second time when he found out she was pregnant. Whatever happened, we're talking about some _serious crimes_ , and can only hope he's been found out by paternity test and tossed in the darkest dungeon the Corps can find ("Let's just say I put him in a hole and threw away the hole"). But however bad this one "bad apple" is, this doesn't remotely justify or even _rationally relate to_ the girl's so-called point, that "the Corps has become corrupt, has outlived whatever purpose it once may have served, and should be abolished."

This girl needs a history lesson, and not one written by the Dexters.

**Author's Note:**

> Author's note: Discussing this allegation with someone almost landed me in the ER the first time - finally I got this chapter done - so please be extra respectful if you're going to try to talk to me about this. This isn't a chapter I'm posting easily, and I may not be able to discuss this with you. If I can't, I won't. Thanks.


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